Chastened by its first dual-meet loss to Yale in a dozen years last February and by an uncharacteristically low fourth-place NISRA ranking in 2001-2002, the storied Harvard men's squash program is priming for a comeback season this winter. Despite losing three key contributors to graduation, Harvard is adding junior standout Will Broadbent and is expecting several members of last year's squash to be key contributors after last year's baptism by fire.

BAJ STARTS FOURTH SEASON
Coached by Satinder Bajwa, who will be entering his fourth campaign directing both the men's and women's program, and co-captained by Dylan Patterson and Tom Storch, who will anchor the midsection of the nine-man Crimson line-up, Harvard squash appears poised to improve on its third-place Ivy League finish last season and challenge for the league championship that it won in 2001.

Each of the last three Ivy League championships has gone to the winner of the early-February Harvard-Princeton match, which in each case has been decided by a 5-4 tally. Ironically, Princeton's wins in 2000 and 2002 have come at the Murr Center in Cambridge, while Harvard's triumph in 2001 occurred at the Jadwin Gymnasium in southern New Jersey.

The powerful Princeton squad last year was characterized by an excellent top five and lack of depth down below, a disparity that was fully evinced in its dual-match and Potter postseason wins over Yale, in each of which Yale swept the Nos. 6-9 positions but Princeton rode their victories at Nos. 1-5 to eke out a pair of airtight 5-4 wins.

In the Harvard-Princeton match, however, Harvard's Jamaican-born sophomore James Bullock shocked Tiger star and 2001 Individual Intercollegiate champion David Yik in a three-game upset, only to have this breakthrough result more than counter-balanced by rallying Princeton wins at the Nos. 8 and 9 positions. Harvard senior Tomo Hamakawa led Rob Siverd two games to one and 7-5 in the fifth before dropping that crucial game at 9-7 and never challenging in the fifth, and Crimson sophomore Ryan Abraham of Trinidad split the first two games of his match with Nate Beck and took an 8-3 advantage in the third, but Beck saved a slew of game-points (including one more in the tiebreaker as well) to take that game 10-9 and handily win the fourth.

BACK TO GLORY YEARS?
Prior to this three-year period of 5-4 title-determining clashes with Princeton, Harvard had won nine straight Ivy League titles under coaches Steve Piltch ('91-'92) and Bill Doyle ('93-'99) after many decades of nearly unbroken intercollegiate supremacy under the exceptional stewardship of its three legendary coaches Harry Cowles (19 years, 1914-32), Jack Barnaby (44 years, 1933-76) and Dave Fish (13 years, 1977-89). Besides the Japanese-born Hamakawa, the program is also losing Dave Barry, who played most of last season in the No. 4 position, and its captain Pete Karlen to graduation.

The latter was a perennial all-American whose drive and determination made him in many ways the heart and soul of the Crimson line-up. But these very normally praiseworthy qualities ironically may have sabotaged Karlen's senior season, which began well with his late-December advance to and almost through the final of the Intercollegiate Invitational at the University Club of New York just after Christmas, where he led defending champion Lefika Ragontse of Trinity two games to one and 6-0 in the fourth before a late-game cramp contributed to Ragontse's 9-7 rescue of that game and identical 9-7 margin in the fifth.

KARLEN'S RISE AND INJURY
Karlen's improvement in recent years has been partly attributable to his murderous training regimen, which probably played a role in the injury he incurred in his right foot in a U. S. Open match he was playing in Boston, just five days after this University Club event, in which his participation in a tournament-winning doubles effort with Patterson along with his singles exploits necessitated the playing of seven total matches in just two days. Furthermore, the Harvard varsity had returned from a match-filled visit to Jamaica just prior to this college invitational, and the attritional effect of this hectic schedule almost certainly contributed to the severe pain he experienced in Boston, which had a "tearing away" sensation to it and was later diagnosed as a sprain of the lisfranc ligament on the bottom of the front part of the foot and an inflammation of the joint capsule of the big toe.

Karlen attempted to recover from this injury in time to compete just 29 days later against powerhouse Trinity, but he was clearly hurting both in this match and in a tune-up match against Dartmouth a few days before. The meat of the college schedule occurs in February, in which virtually all of the key matches are compressed in just a few torrid weeks, and in attempting to stay in top condition by grueling workouts on the stationary bike, Karlen ruptured a blood vessel in his eye and thereby ended his season.

The absence of their big gun and team leader not only deprived the Crimson of confidence Karlen exuded and the victories that he usually provided but also had a major and harmful "trickle-down" effect upon the rest of the line-up by forcing everyone else to move up a notch and thereby face tougher opposition. Several players were at higher slots than they had been before even prior to Karlen's mishaps due to the graduation of three members of Harvard's top six in the 2000-2001 squad, which had pressed Trinity to the very limit before barely dropping a 5-4 decision in a wild one at Murr.

That very exigency, which probably hurt the team this past season, may well be to Harvard's advantage in 2002-2003, since players like Patterson and Isaac(Ziggy) Whitman, who struggled last year in their elevated positions in the line-up, will likely be able to use that painfully-acquired experience to achieve much better results during the forthcoming season.

There were signs of this phenomenon even at the tail-end of last year, when a number of Harvard players (Storch with Aftab Mathur and Patterson against Peter Grote to name two) avenged dual-meet losses in their 6-3 loss to Yale in the rematch at the Potter Cup Nine-Man Team Competition just four days later, which Harvard dominated, eight matches to one, to capture the third-place play-off after their semi-final loss to a title-bound Trinity team while Yale was losing to Princeton.

The fact that the Harvard players, rather than being traumatized by their defeat in New Haven, were so keen to play the Elis again and then backed up this ardor with such a compelling performance, even without their sidelined star, was especially gratifying to Coach Bajwa, who is optimistic that the uplifting effect of that outcome may have a carryover effect into the 2002-2003 season.

NEW STRENGTH AT THE TOP
This metaphysical dimension will be complemented by a very tangible addition as well in the lanky form of Will Broadbent, a high-school star from Greenwich who reached the final of the USSRA 19-and-under Nationals last winter and was heavily recruited by every elite college program in the country. Broadbent has received intensive coaching from Field Club of Greenwich head pro Damian Walker, the two-time and current U. S. National Champion, for the past several years, and he will almost certainly join Bullock, Patterson and the Vancouver-based sophomore Mike Blumberg (who defeated Ragontse as the highlight of an excellent freshman season last winter) in the top-four region of Harvard's line-up.

Backing them up will be Storch, sophomore Asher Hochberg, a graduate of the strong Chatham, NJ program headed by pro Geoff Mitchell, and Whitman, a junior from Philadelphia and the son of Glen Whitman, who as a Harvard senior went undefeated during the regular season and advanced all the way to the final of the 1974 Intercollegiate Individual championship before losing to the Mexican dynamo Juan deVillafranca.

Sidelined through much of his freshman season with a lingering groin injury and forced to play a little out of position last year, Whitman demonstrated his potential in a tight five-game loss to Trinity's Nickolas Kyme last March and only needs to shed his conservative style and become a bit more aggressive in his shot-making to ensure a highly successful remainder of his varsity career.

The final few positions on the varsity should be manned by Gaurav Yadav, a sophomore from India who is returning to school after taking last year off, the aforementioned Abraham, and Indrek Vainu, a native of Estonia who played on the fringes of the varsity this past season.

After enduring its quartet of losses last year to Trinity (twice), Princeton and Yale, an unusually high total for a program of Harvard's nonpareil tradition, the long vaunted Harvard men's program is looking to rebound and regain their long-held Ivy League championship, which figures to evolve into an extremely close competition between the Big Three of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, who between them have won this prestigious team championship in each of the past 28 years since a Penn team led by Joe Swain, the late Tom Peck and Gil Mateer seized a share of the crown way back in 1973-74. Whether returning lettermen like Bullock, Whitman, Blumberg and Patterson can consolidate the gains they made last season and whether Broadbent can realize his exciting potential may well determine the ultimate outcome of this ambitious mission.